A Clear Day

Finally, a clear day. I can see the mountain to the West whose name I can never remember and patches of blue are tearing through the formerly impenetrable cloud. The sounds of some loudspeaker-carrying car passing by bounce up through the window – they are not drowned out by the white noise of rain. I guess the rain had some advantages.

I find myself anxious. I have not gone outside to take photos in a couple weeks. I feel the same way as when I go through an unproductive period at home. I’m a little surlier and I feel incomplete. When I was at university, one of my courses was a philosophy course studying madness. I tended to focus my studies on depression since that subject was a bit near my heart, but I remember finding a web site linking madness and creativity. If I recall correctly, its focus was on artistic therapy for various mental diseases, but there was one case in particular that intrigued me.

It showed an image of a piece of toilet paper. On it was a portrait of a man. It was dirty and rough as any portrait drawn on toilet paper would be, but had an interesting style. It turns out that the portrait was drawn by a man with a compulsion to be creative. He couldn’t help himself. In this case, he was at a restaurant, found some toilet paper for himself and used cigarette ashes to create the portrait.

I sometimes wonder if I have a weaker version of the same condition. Here I am writing, and I feel better already. For some reason I haven’t written much of anything in the last two weeks and I’m sure that exacerbates my problem. And it’s not like I would have been short on material. Yes, I have started settling into a routine here, but there are details a plenty worthy of a note or two here on my trusty laptop (which still needs a name, by the way).

I know part of it stems from my obsession with time and mortality. I keep finding myself saying there aren’t enough hours in the day and that life is too short. When Sarah and I have to say goodbye to each other late at night lest we while away the hours before dawn without sleeping and I haven’t completed any of my chores for the day, 24 hours is far too confining. When I consider all the places in the world I would like to explore and all the places I will never see because of my limited time here, I would beg for more years so that I could experience more of this incredible planet.

So, when I fail to be productive or creative, I feel like I am not making the most of that limited time. Mind you, I haven’t exactly been wasting away here. There are certain changes I could make to tighten up my schedule, but I don’t know that I have been excessively lazy or anything of the sort. Socializing is an important pursuit and I’d rather not cut that from my life. Maybe I could ease up on the Internet surfing and try to be a bit more efficient around the house. I could try to get more of my emailing done at the Board of Education (when possible) and actually complete the tasks I set out for myself while there.

Okay, that’s good. I’ll start today. Here I am, I’ve done some writing and I could easily do more (though I do have two more days here on Thursday and Friday – perhaps I should save some of my writing for then) and I have some other tasks that deserve my attention here.

I also should re-start my old routine of a paragraph a day to describe the day’s positives. It was helpful before and for those times when the rain is keeping me and my camera inside, it will keep me focused on the good things around me and in me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 at 12:00 am. It is filed under Blog, Japan, Travel and tagged with japan, Travel, travel log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.